With a Mac-only XCode Apple locked in their developers into its ecosystem and is getting a nice fee from every single one (the margin on the sale of a Mac). Actually removing that lock in would be a wise move to expand further the developers base but IMHO it would be a very un-Applish one. The way to go would not be switching to a single competitor's OS but the Android one, that is a cross platform development system. Just imagine if a Windows update accidentally breaks XCode and there isn't any working development system for iOS for a couple of weeks.
By the way, iOS 5 went the Android way by removing the dependency from a computer. You can use an Android phone without any supporting computer because you can buy and install apps directly from the store and use all the Google's cloud services. Apple still lacks some flexibility (I can attach USB pen drives to my Android phone) but it also went further in some other directions, with the backup and those synchronization little services like syncing ebook's page marks. Hopefully Google will catch up as Apple did. Competition is (often) good.
You're suggesting the possibility of an IP bubble? if you do you might be right. Furthermore there is another side to this issue. It's easy to trade atoms (i.e.: meat) for other atoms (i.e. water) but if you trade ideas for food well... you must be either very talented or very convincing. The second alternative scales better and many industries are indoctrinating us since we are born about video clip music, movies, smart phone apps, etc being so much important for our happiness and well being. However even if you manage to make the whole world believe that, there is a real risk that the time will come when your customers stop believing you or spend their money for more fundamental stuff and leave you with nothing in your hands.
I'm also using UNR on my netbook. It's perfect on that screen size but it's bad on my notebook. Maybe it's ok on a 13" screen and Unity might be good on that display too. "One size fits all" can't work well on every device. I hope Canonical will realize it in a year or two. Meanwhile I'm perfectly happy with my customized Gnome 2 desktop.
Me too. Touching the screen to change the tab in the browser would be quite natural. Furthermore our phones are training us to touch so it will become even more natural.
Yes. It would be quite hard to convert all of Office to a pure touch interface and it will ruin all the suite. You should try any office-like app on a touch screen, either and iPad or a 4" phone. Word processing is not so bad (but it is bad) and you start looking for a mouse as soon as you have to edit the text you wrote. You also start looking for a keyboard very quickly if you're working with a spreadsheet. Entering formulas without mouse and keyboard is a real pain. You end up going back to your computer to do the job.
As a Linux and Gnome user I noticed how MS seems to have borrowed by the Unity and Gnome Shell projects, which I don't appreciate, at least not on my relatively large display (I'll switch to xfce). However I'm also thinking about the trend of having smaller and smaller displays on notebooks. 13" widescreens (or reduced-height, which is what they really are) are becoming common on consumer laptops. Those screens will get a touch layer soon and the OS must be able to put it to use. Given those constraints (smaller screen and touch input) Win 8 may even be a good solution. Will it be a good one on 24" displays with no touch input? Probably not. I'm also looking forward to the culture shock of millions of office workers used to a daily routine made of Windows Explorer, Outlook, Word, Excel and the task bar (maybe somebody even ventures to ALT-TAB to switch between applications) and having to start living with this new interface. Their IT departments are starting to have nightmares right now.
Given all of that I wonder if MS will eventually release the OS with a double interface, small with touch and large without touch. If they don't they're taking a huge risk and all those hw manufacturers depending on them might not be thrilled. How many people will go to a store, look around and say "oh my, I'll buy a Mac. At least it's got an interface I can use"? Maybe 2012 will be the year of the KDE Linux desktop, if they don't start messing with it as Gnome did:-)
I wish I had mod points for you. I have my private cloud on the desk, the USB drives I backup my stuff to:-)
To be fair, I also have some servers in other countries which I use to backup some critical data to (encrypted!). I also encrypt and copy some data to my Dropbox folder (that should be in another continent). Big companies have multiple data centers so they could do the same degree of disaster recovery within their network.
Leaving the private cloud aside, some companies use github to host the source code for their projects, even the ones they develop for their customers, and services like basecamp and lighthouse to manage projects. I prefer using my own redmine and gitosis server (is that a private cloud even if they are quite far away from me?) and those kind of services had really changed the way we work.
I'm starting to miss the height of the screens we had a few years ago. We have reduced-height screens now, also known as wide screens because it's a better marketing pitch. If you want the same vertical space you have to buy a wider monitor or one which rotates (both might be ok for desktops) or a wider and bulkier notebook which contradicts the very concept of a portable computer, unless you're not a nostalgic of those old transportables of the '80s or you're the owner of one of these beasts:-)
PS: about keyboard mappings, among the other things Gnome let's me remap Caps Lock as Control and that's a Good Thing.
Foreword: I've got an old Nokia N70 so things might have changed a lot in Symbian.
A very annoying feature of its permission management system is that it is too fine grained and it doesn't remember user decisions across different executions of the same app. It asks me allow/deny every time I open a file or folder (imagine traversing a 4 folders hierarchy, the SD card counts as one) and that's bad enough. Forgetting my answers when I close the app is even worse. Sometimes I leave the phone on in airplane mode at night not to have to go through all those dialogs.
Android seems to have taken the opposite road. Maybe this mod implements a better middle ground.
Thank you for the link. Skype has a limited form of desktop sharing. Actually it's a desktop camera: you send a video stream of your desktop or a part of it but there is no shared mouse, clipboard or keyboard. It works cross platform (obviously) and I use it sometimes to show code to the people I'm working with. Sometimes I'd love to be able to click on the desktop of my friends asking for help for fixing broken stuff on their PCs.
By the way, Skype crashes very little on my Ubuntu, maybe 2 or 3 times per year. I don't remember how it compares with Skype for Windows (not using it since a couple of years ago) but it's better than Windows Explorer.
It's not that easy. I seldom use Skype to communicate with friends and never with relatives. I use it mostly for business, to get in touch with my customers and my coworkers (both chat and voice). I can't tell them that they have to start using a new messaging platform only to communicate with me. It will be very inconvenient and they'll invite me to call them with a phone which will cost me money and I'll still be left without a chat. They'll hate to have to spend money to call me so this is bad for my business.
So either all the world move to a Skype alternative or I'm effectively locked in. This is worse than MS Office's lock in, because there are other programs that are compatible with its file formats but there is nothing that is compatible with Skype.
May I quote the very book we're discussing about? From Chapter 7. Eclipse:
The stereotypical image of an open source developer is that of an altruistic person toiling late into night fixing bugs and implementing fantastic new features to address their own personal interests. In contrast, if you look back at the early history of the Eclipse project, some of the initial code that was donated was based on VisualAge for Java, developed by IBM. The first committers who worked on this open source project were employees of an IBM subsidiary called Object Technology International (OTI). These committers were paid to work full time on the open source project, to answer questions on newsgroups, address bugs, and implement new features. A consortium of interested software vendors was formed to expand this open tooling effort. The initial members of the Eclipse consortium were Borland, IBM, Merant, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, RedHat, SuSE, and TogetherSoft.
By investing in this effort, these companies would have the expertise to ship commercial products based on Eclipse. This is similar to investments that corporations make in contributing to the Linux kernel because it is in their self-interest to have employees improving the open source software that underlies their commercial offerings.
A little misunderstanding between two teams of people, one thinking in metric and the other one thinking in imperial units. The details are in the wikipedia link in my original post.
I agree that those programs are no true alternatives, not until all my customers, my coworkers and my friends start using them. They'll stick to Skype and so must I. If they'll stop developing the Linux client and make the current one incompatible with the other ones I might even have to buy a Windows netbook only for it. At least I'll test web apps with IE9 outside a VM. I guess I'll become a heavy user of Synergy
By the way, I definitively switched to Linux at the time of Skype 4, with that big bad full screen interface and I don't know if things went for the worse or for the better since then. The Linux client looks like the old minimalistic Windows interface and has a better feeling. It's a matter of personal tastes.
Linux is only the kernel and it is doing well everywhere it runs. With that I mean doing well the things a kernel should do, not the things applications do.
What you called Linux is actually GNU/Linux, that is the GNU software distribution on the top of Linux kernel, plus a lot of other applications. I agree that it got used almost only as an OS for servers, even if it served me well as a desktop for the last couple of years. Android, which we could call Google/Linux, is doing well almost only on phones but it's too early to say that it already lost tablets. We have to wait a could of years before assessing its success or demise.
But actually, do I care about the kernel I'm using to write this answer? It could be Linux, it could be something else. What I care about is the applications I'm using to do my job, that is the GNU part of the GNU/Linux pair. Maybe what you really meant to say was that GNU has really succeeded only on servers? I agree. Google seems to be succeeding on phones.
200 meters or 200 yards? That's going to be another source of imperial-to-metric misunderstandings. Not that we're landing a spacecraft under the surface of Mars this time, but think about that poor Mazda and that poor Ford talking, not understanding each other and the unsuspecting people on board;-)
Most people suck as drivers, particularly at braking and there some very good reasons for that.
People are not used at braking at full strength and have no idea of what their cars are really able to do. Whenever one brakes a little harder than usual s/he experiences a deceleration a little (or a lot) too strong to be comfortable with (in my experience very few people enjoy strong accelerations, especially lateral and negative). Furthermore if you brake hard you have to start doing it close to the turn or to the stop: that's not safe because it's unexpected by the rest of traffic, there is less margin for mistakes and it could be assessed as dangerous driving by any cop watching or anybody in car with you.
So professional drivers brake very late when racing but professionals and normal drivers brake very early in any open road scenario. The only exceptions are emergency stops, when about all non professionals push on the brake pedal with all their might and (not being used to do it) lock wheels and hit whatever they were trying to avoid. ABS is useful because it turns those unexperienced drivers into professionals that can modulate the brakes and stop in time or drive around the obstacle.
1. Unity: don't care, won't use. I'll apt-get install xubuntu-desktop.
2. Gnome 3: same as above.
3. Thunderbird: good, so they're going to fix that four years old bug preventing people from dragging attachments from a message to a folder?
4. LibreOffice: no problem for me, I'll apt-get it but I think most people would appreciate to be able to open.doc and.xls files in the initial installation. Maybe a small program could handle office files and prompt to install the office suite. Nevertheless people is more willing to wait some more minutes when installing the OS than when they have some work to do, maybe quickly. I believe that this decision is detrimental to the user experience.
5. Chromium: don't care as I install Chrome, Firefox and Opera. I'm using Firefox mostly because of Firebug.
6. Computer Janitor and PiTiVi: Computer What!? I use OpenShot as video editor.
7. LightDM: seems a good idea for a functionality I use for 5 seconds when I boot my notebook, which doesn't happen often as I suspend it at night.
8. Déjà Dup: very good idea. I'm using a combination of rsnapshot and duplicity and I don't think DD has the same functionality (it doesn't pull files from remote servers or runs scripts on them to dump DBs, right?) but it's good to offer a good backup functionality for the general public. However they should implement something like Time Machine to backup the whole system.
9. Ubuntu Software Center: don't care much. I find more convenient to use apt-get and apt-cache than using the GUI and what I usually see of the USC is only the updates window. However I'm sure that many people find more convenient using the GUI so those changes will be appreciated.
Summing up, I started reading TFA expecting some more stupid changes from Canonical but I'm surprised to see that they either don't affect me or they might improve my experience. It's a good change after at least one year of invisible changes that made my notebook perform better (i.e.: suspend always work, ext4 is fast) and too visible ones that I had to work around to be able to work the way I like (all the GUI changes).
My notebook is about 13" wide and if it had one of those things called wide screens the width of its screen would be exactly the same as the one it came with. What I'd get would be a shorter screen.
The same considerations apply to TV sets. If you have to fit a modern one in a constrained space what you get is a shorter TV with less viewing area than your old 4:3 TV. But wide screen is a better selling proposition than short screen, which is what they really are.
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With a Mac-only XCode Apple locked in their developers into its ecosystem and is getting a nice fee from every single one (the margin on the sale of a Mac). Actually removing that lock in would be a wise move to expand further the developers base but IMHO it would be a very un-Applish one. The way to go would not be switching to a single competitor's OS but the Android one, that is a cross platform development system. Just imagine if a Windows update accidentally breaks XCode and there isn't any working development system for iOS for a couple of weeks.
By the way, iOS 5 went the Android way by removing the dependency from a computer. You can use an Android phone without any supporting computer because you can buy and install apps directly from the store and use all the Google's cloud services. Apple still lacks some flexibility (I can attach USB pen drives to my Android phone) but it also went further in some other directions, with the backup and those synchronization little services like syncing ebook's page marks. Hopefully Google will catch up as Apple did. Competition is (often) good.
Agreed, but the flaw in in /.'s mod system: it should allow for 5, Funny, Insightful scores.
You're suggesting the possibility of an IP bubble? if you do you might be right. Furthermore there is another side to this issue. It's easy to trade atoms (i.e.: meat) for other atoms (i.e. water) but if you trade ideas for food well... you must be either very talented or very convincing. The second alternative scales better and many industries are indoctrinating us since we are born about video clip music, movies, smart phone apps, etc being so much important for our happiness and well being. However even if you manage to make the whole world believe that, there is a real risk that the time will come when your customers stop believing you or spend their money for more fundamental stuff and leave you with nothing in your hands.
I'm also using UNR on my netbook. It's perfect on that screen size but it's bad on my notebook. Maybe it's ok on a 13" screen and Unity might be good on that display too. "One size fits all" can't work well on every device. I hope Canonical will realize it in a year or two. Meanwhile I'm perfectly happy with my customized Gnome 2 desktop.
Me too. Touching the screen to change the tab in the browser would be quite natural. Furthermore our phones are training us to touch so it will become even more natural.
Yes. It would be quite hard to convert all of Office to a pure touch interface and it will ruin all the suite. You should try any office-like app on a touch screen, either and iPad or a 4" phone. Word processing is not so bad (but it is bad) and you start looking for a mouse as soon as you have to edit the text you wrote. You also start looking for a keyboard very quickly if you're working with a spreadsheet. Entering formulas without mouse and keyboard is a real pain. You end up going back to your computer to do the job.
As a Linux and Gnome user I noticed how MS seems to have borrowed by the Unity and Gnome Shell projects, which I don't appreciate, at least not on my relatively large display (I'll switch to xfce). However I'm also thinking about the trend of having smaller and smaller displays on notebooks. 13" widescreens (or reduced-height, which is what they really are) are becoming common on consumer laptops. Those screens will get a touch layer soon and the OS must be able to put it to use. Given those constraints (smaller screen and touch input) Win 8 may even be a good solution. Will it be a good one on 24" displays with no touch input? Probably not. I'm also looking forward to the culture shock of millions of office workers used to a daily routine made of Windows Explorer, Outlook, Word, Excel and the task bar (maybe somebody even ventures to ALT-TAB to switch between applications) and having to start living with this new interface. Their IT departments are starting to have nightmares right now.
Given all of that I wonder if MS will eventually release the OS with a double interface, small with touch and large without touch. If they don't they're taking a huge risk and all those hw manufacturers depending on them might not be thrilled. How many people will go to a store, look around and say "oh my, I'll buy a Mac. At least it's got an interface I can use"? Maybe 2012 will be the year of the KDE Linux desktop, if they don't start messing with it as Gnome did :-)
And Apple and Microsoft were two of the companies that broke that wall, possibly the most famous ones. What irony.
I wish I had mod points for you. I have my private cloud on the desk, the USB drives I backup my stuff to :-)
To be fair, I also have some servers in other countries which I use to backup some critical data to (encrypted!). I also encrypt and copy some data to my Dropbox folder (that should be in another continent). Big companies have multiple data centers so they could do the same degree of disaster recovery within their network.
Leaving the private cloud aside, some companies use github to host the source code for their projects, even the ones they develop for their customers, and services like basecamp and lighthouse to manage projects. I prefer using my own redmine and gitosis server (is that a private cloud even if they are quite far away from me?) and those kind of services had really changed the way we work.
It's what's inside a Samsung Galaxy S2.
I'm starting to miss the height of the screens we had a few years ago. We have reduced-height screens now, also known as wide screens because it's a better marketing pitch. If you want the same vertical space you have to buy a wider monitor or one which rotates (both might be ok for desktops) or a wider and bulkier notebook which contradicts the very concept of a portable computer, unless you're not a nostalgic of those old transportables of the '80s or you're the owner of one of these beasts :-)
PS: about keyboard mappings, among the other things Gnome let's me remap Caps Lock as Control and that's a Good Thing.
Maybe they're moving the ocean somewhere else. It would be less bizarre than proposing to store nuclear waste there.
Foreword: I've got an old Nokia N70 so things might have changed a lot in Symbian.
A very annoying feature of its permission management system is that it is too fine grained and it doesn't remember user decisions across different executions of the same app. It asks me allow/deny every time I open a file or folder (imagine traversing a 4 folders hierarchy, the SD card counts as one) and that's bad enough. Forgetting my answers when I close the app is even worse. Sometimes I leave the phone on in airplane mode at night not to have to go through all those dialogs.
Android seems to have taken the opposite road. Maybe this mod implements a better middle ground.
Thank you for the link. Skype has a limited form of desktop sharing. Actually it's a desktop camera: you send a video stream of your desktop or a part of it but there is no shared mouse, clipboard or keyboard. It works cross platform (obviously) and I use it sometimes to show code to the people I'm working with. Sometimes I'd love to be able to click on the desktop of my friends asking for help for fixing broken stuff on their PCs.
By the way, Skype crashes very little on my Ubuntu, maybe 2 or 3 times per year. I don't remember how it compares with Skype for Windows (not using it since a couple of years ago) but it's better than Windows Explorer.
It's not that easy. I seldom use Skype to communicate with friends and never with relatives. I use it mostly for business, to get in touch with my customers and my coworkers (both chat and voice). I can't tell them that they have to start using a new messaging platform only to communicate with me. It will be very inconvenient and they'll invite me to call them with a phone which will cost me money and I'll still be left without a chat. They'll hate to have to spend money to call me so this is bad for my business.
So either all the world move to a Skype alternative or I'm effectively locked in. This is worse than MS Office's lock in, because there are other programs that are compatible with its file formats but there is nothing that is compatible with Skype.
Is the former Soviet Union a good enough example?
The stereotypical image of an open source developer is that of an altruistic person toiling late into night fixing bugs and implementing fantastic new features to address their own personal interests. In contrast, if you look back at the early history of the Eclipse project, some of the initial code that was donated was based on VisualAge for Java, developed by IBM. The first committers who worked on this open source project were employees of an IBM subsidiary called Object Technology International (OTI). These committers were paid to work full time on the open source project, to answer questions on newsgroups, address bugs, and implement new features. A consortium of interested software vendors was formed to expand this open tooling effort. The initial members of the Eclipse consortium were Borland, IBM, Merant, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, RedHat, SuSE, and TogetherSoft. By investing in this effort, these companies would have the expertise to ship commercial products based on Eclipse. This is similar to investments that corporations make in contributing to the Linux kernel because it is in their self-interest to have employees improving the open source software that underlies their commercial offerings.
A little misunderstanding between two teams of people, one thinking in metric and the other one thinking in imperial units. The details are in the wikipedia link in my original post.
I agree that those programs are no true alternatives, not until all my customers, my coworkers and my friends start using them. They'll stick to Skype and so must I. If they'll stop developing the Linux client and make the current one incompatible with the other ones I might even have to buy a Windows netbook only for it. At least I'll test web apps with IE9 outside a VM. I guess I'll become a heavy user of Synergy
By the way, I definitively switched to Linux at the time of Skype 4, with that big bad full screen interface and I don't know if things went for the worse or for the better since then. The Linux client looks like the old minimalistic Windows interface and has a better feeling. It's a matter of personal tastes.
Well, I'm a Linux user and I paid money to Skype to be able to call and receive calls from landlines and mobile phones.
Linux is only the kernel and it is doing well everywhere it runs. With that I mean doing well the things a kernel should do, not the things applications do.
What you called Linux is actually GNU/Linux, that is the GNU software distribution on the top of Linux kernel, plus a lot of other applications. I agree that it got used almost only as an OS for servers, even if it served me well as a desktop for the last couple of years. Android, which we could call Google/Linux, is doing well almost only on phones but it's too early to say that it already lost tablets. We have to wait a could of years before assessing its success or demise.
But actually, do I care about the kernel I'm using to write this answer? It could be Linux, it could be something else. What I care about is the applications I'm using to do my job, that is the GNU part of the GNU/Linux pair. Maybe what you really meant to say was that GNU has really succeeded only on servers? I agree. Google seems to be succeeding on phones.
200 meters or 200 yards? That's going to be another source of imperial-to-metric misunderstandings. Not that we're landing a spacecraft under the surface of Mars this time, but think about that poor Mazda and that poor Ford talking, not understanding each other and the unsuspecting people on board ;-)
Most people suck as drivers, particularly at braking and there some very good reasons for that.
People are not used at braking at full strength and have no idea of what their cars are really able to do. Whenever one brakes a little harder than usual s/he experiences a deceleration a little (or a lot) too strong to be comfortable with (in my experience very few people enjoy strong accelerations, especially lateral and negative). Furthermore if you brake hard you have to start doing it close to the turn or to the stop: that's not safe because it's unexpected by the rest of traffic, there is less margin for mistakes and it could be assessed as dangerous driving by any cop watching or anybody in car with you.
So professional drivers brake very late when racing but professionals and normal drivers brake very early in any open road scenario. The only exceptions are emergency stops, when about all non professionals push on the brake pedal with all their might and (not being used to do it) lock wheels and hit whatever they were trying to avoid. ABS is useful because it turns those unexperienced drivers into professionals that can modulate the brakes and stop in time or drive around the obstacle.
1. Unity: don't care, won't use. I'll apt-get install xubuntu-desktop.
2. Gnome 3: same as above.
3. Thunderbird: good, so they're going to fix that four years old bug preventing people from dragging attachments from a message to a folder?
4. LibreOffice: no problem for me, I'll apt-get it but I think most people would appreciate to be able to open .doc and .xls files in the initial installation. Maybe a small program could handle office files and prompt to install the office suite. Nevertheless people is more willing to wait some more minutes when installing the OS than when they have some work to do, maybe quickly. I believe that this decision is detrimental to the user experience.
5. Chromium: don't care as I install Chrome, Firefox and Opera. I'm using Firefox mostly because of Firebug.
6. Computer Janitor and PiTiVi: Computer What!? I use OpenShot as video editor.
7. LightDM: seems a good idea for a functionality I use for 5 seconds when I boot my notebook, which doesn't happen often as I suspend it at night.
8. Déjà Dup: very good idea. I'm using a combination of rsnapshot and duplicity and I don't think DD has the same functionality (it doesn't pull files from remote servers or runs scripts on them to dump DBs, right?) but it's good to offer a good backup functionality for the general public. However they should implement something like Time Machine to backup the whole system.
9. Ubuntu Software Center: don't care much. I find more convenient to use apt-get and apt-cache than using the GUI and what I usually see of the USC is only the updates window. However I'm sure that many people find more convenient using the GUI so those changes will be appreciated.
Summing up, I started reading TFA expecting some more stupid changes from Canonical but I'm surprised to see that they either don't affect me or they might improve my experience. It's a good change after at least one year of invisible changes that made my notebook perform better (i.e.: suspend always work, ext4 is fast) and too visible ones that I had to work around to be able to work the way I like (all the GUI changes).
My notebook is about 13" wide and if it had one of those things called wide screens the width of its screen would be exactly the same as the one it came with. What I'd get would be a shorter screen.
The same considerations apply to TV sets. If you have to fit a modern one in a constrained space what you get is a shorter TV with less viewing area than your old 4:3 TV. But wide screen is a better selling proposition than short screen, which is what they really are.